Much was written and said Wednesday as we marked the 18th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took down the twin towers of the World Trade Center, destroyed a large section of the Pentagon and snuffed out nearly three thousand innocent lives. The networks and cable news channels remembered the selfless heroism of New York City police officers and firefighters – who ran in to the very mouth of Hell even as thousands were running out. Such remembrance is well deserved.

The words and actions of another individual should also be remembered. His name is George W. Bush.

President Bush did not leave office in triumph. By the end of his presidency, the psychological and political toll of what we now recognize as the ill-advised Iraq War, together with his stubborn refusal to stand up to his critics, had reduced President Bush’s approval numbers to the low 30s and worse.

But on September 11, 2001, and in the days that followed, George W. Bush was the very exemplar of the United States presidency. He was by turns as the unfolding moments required, tough, resolute, angry, sad and authentically compassionate. His command of a dynamic situation, his carefully chosen and well-delivered words and his resolute stance against the forces of evil that had at last revealed themselves in a way that could not be misinterpreted, all served to bring the nation together.

The president’s first public statement following the attacks came shortly after noon in a quickly-arranged recorded statement made at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. He set the tone early by saying,

Freedom itself was attacked this morning, by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended.”

Three days later President Bush visited what came to be called “ground zero” at the site of the collapsed twin towers. While he was standing on top of a wrecked fire engine, he began speaking to the firefighters and workers who were sifting the rubble, still hoping to find survivors. Someone handed the president a bullhorn and in one of the most memorable moments of his presidency he said,

The nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut. As we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens…” (voice in crowd: “We can’t hear you!”) “I can hear you!” (cheers) “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. (cheers) And the people…and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear allof us soon.”

From that riveting moment right through a pitch-perfect address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, President Bush was the kind of leader we expect our presidents to be.

Following 9/11, the motto quickly became, “Never Forget.” For whatever verdict we and history ultimately pronounce as to the totality of George W. Bush’s presidency, let us never forget that in the dark days when a nation stood wounded, a good and decent man stood tall.

We know that Democrats cannot stand Donald Trump. They don’t simply oppose him. They don’t merely dislike his policies. They actually loathe him with seething, all-absorbing white-hot hatred. They will never forgive a brazen, outspoken, intemperate reality TV star like Donald Trump for snatching from the clutching hands of Hillary Clinton that which was rightfully hers.

My prediction that Democrats would eventually get over it and revert to more traditional political opposition was flatly wrong. In many ways, Democrats are even more hysterical today than they were immediately following the election.

I have friends whom I would nominally believe to be right-leaning Republicans who are also not on board with Donald Trump. (Not many, mind you. According to any number of polls, Trump’s approval among Republicans stands somewhere close to 90 percent.)

But there are still #NeverTrump Republicans and I know some of them. When I press them as to why, given Trump’s undeniable successes, the answer almost always boils down to his tweets.

“Not presidential,” my friends say. “Beneath the dignity of the office.” “Sinking to the level of his critics.” OK, fine, let’s say they’re right. The question then becomes; outgunned as Republicans are, how else can one expect to win and then, more importantly, effectively govern?

Indulge me please, in a baseball metaphor as I say that every Republican administration starts with an 0-2 count. That’s because Democrats own – lock, stock and barrel – the commanding heights of the culture. They dominate mainstream media, academia from kindergarten through college, the permanent federal bureaucracy, movies, music, theater, book publishing, high tech and social media.

Most Republicans are no match. Most Republicans, being human, do what they can to avoid snarky criticism of the sort that Democrats never have to endure. It’s called ‘playing to not lose’ and too many Republicans engage in it. We all remember Mitt Romney politely standing there in the second debate in 2012 with that strained smile on his face as CNN’s Candy Crowley effectively ended his campaign.

George W. Bush, a thoroughly good and decent man, left office in almost total disgrace – with approval numbers in the 20s – for the simple reason that he took withering incoming from the media and the late-night shows and chose to never once even attempt to return fire.

Donald Trump is no George Bush and he’s sure as hell no Mitt Romney. Trump almost never throws the first punch. But if one is thrown at him, he very quickly punches back. Though some of his Twitter fusillades have been a bit much, overall they’ve been effective. For the first time, it’s Democrats dealing with incoming fire.

We on the right have never seen this and sometimes it’s a bit unsettling. But it’s nevertheless, long overdue. Conservatism works every time it’s tried. The problem has been that it hasn’t been tried all that assiduously in a while.

By fighting back, Donald Trump has changed that. That’s a new thing for Republicans – and well worth the occasional discomforts.

As the 2020 presidential campaign continues to crank up it’s wise for us to repeatedly ask ourselves this question: Aside from seething, rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of Donald Trump, what alternatives to Trump administration policies do any of the Democrats offer?

It was Clinton advisor James Carville who said, “It’s the economy, stupid,” so let’s start there. Is it the case here in late summer 2019 that U.S. unemployment is too low? Are there just too many people working and earning a paycheck? Are entirely too many formerly chronically unemployed blacks, Hispanics and women now working? Do we want them to go back to being idle?

Are wages rising too fast? Is inflation too tame? Are 401(k) balances getting too big? What, exactly, should Democrats do to reverse the harm to the economy done by Trump administration policies?

On the subject of trade, if tariffs are ill-advised and dangerous, do Democrats have some other means of addressing 40 years of Chinese mercantilism, intellectual property theft, commodity dumping, currency manipulation and corporate espionage? Should we return to the mouth-the-right-words-while-looking-the-other-way appeasement policies of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama? – policies that have led to the hollowing out of American manufacturing and the resulting diminishment of the heartland middle class?

What about energy and environmental policy? Should we return to the days when a small cabal of angry, West-hating Muslim despots held the American economy hostage via price-fixing the oil and gas markets? Having obtained near energy independence, should we shut-in all of those wells and revert to supplication at the feet of OPEC?

If the Dems want to rid the U.S. economy of its dependence on fossil fuels, do they have a replacement energy source that will keep the U.S. economy at full employment? And if the answer is “no” and the plan really is for the U.S. is to inflict upon itself a deep and lasting economic laceration in the name of saving the planet, do the Dems have a strategy for convincing the leaders of the vastly more polluting countries of India and China to do the same to their economies?

Immigration was a yuuuuge Trump issue in 2016 and it will be again in 2020. This fraught topic is essentially the only issue about which the Democrats have a specific policy agenda. All word-salad, focus-tested talking points to the contrary notwithstanding, the Dems want open borders. So, as we have asked previously in this space, do they have a plan for dealing with millions of poor, low-skilled, social services-consuming migrants? Do most Americans believe that any such plan would be better than stopping migrants from illegally entering the country in the first place?

The question of Campaign 2020 boils down to this. White-hot hatred of Donald Trump is, above all and to the exclusion of nearly everything else, what animates Democrats. If that alone is sufficient to get one or another of the announced Democrats elected, what then will that Democrat do to govern more effectively than Donald Trump has?

We’re about to enter the last lap of 2019 which means that the 2020 election looms large. Before you know it, we’ll be covering the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary.

Unlike 2016, when it was an open race for both parties, the 2020 primary season will be an all-Democrat show. Donald Trump will be watching and waiting between now and sometime next summer, when a Democratic Party nominee is finally settled upon. In these next ten months or so, our national politics are going to turn even more sharply left.

It is a fact of politics that during the primaries, one must play to the base in order to win a spot on the general election ballot. The base of the Democratic Party has gone far left and the candidates are all following.

One example of this lurch to the left is front and center in the minds of parents all across the country who are, at this very moment, packing their 18-year old sons and daughters off to college. In the midst of buying duvet comforters and other dorm room accoutrements, anxious parents are lying awake at night trying to figure out how they’re going to come up with tuition money in the next four years that could otherwise afford them a very nice middle-class home in most communities.

Bernie Sanders has an easy answer. Bernie says that a college education is a “fundamental right.” None of his rivals seriously disagrees. Thus, for the next year and a half we’re going to hear about “free” college and college loan “forgiveness.”

Both are terrifically bad ideas.

Let’s start with loan forgiveness. It’s no such thing. That student loan was funded by the U.S. Treasury via tax receipts, with the proceeds going to a state or private university. The check has been cashed.

“Forgiving” the loan simply means that instead of it being repaid by the student who used the money to obtain a comparative literature degree from a snobby, richly-endowed private university, the owner of that successful, wage-paying, tax-paying auto repair shop down the street – who chose to skip college – now pays it.

As to “free” college; again, there’s no such thing. Someone has to pay. So back we go again to that auto repair shop owner.

When at the point of consumption a good or service is “free,” the discipline of consumer price sensitivity is removed. Absent that discipline, colleges have no incentive to control their expenses. As a result, the cost of college, already unconscionably high, explodes. Such is the moral hazard attendant to anything that appears to the consumer to be “free.”

It’s a fact that “free” anything via the conduit of government is simply the assertion of a presumptive right by one group of people to the fruits of the labor and time of another group of people. It’s an economic model that fails every time it’s tried.

But economic facts don’t often stop Democrats. And they surely won’t stop this group of Democrats.

]]>https://www.youtellmetexas.com/2019/08/22/nothings-free-and-theres-no-forgiveness/feed/5Responsible policy isn’t racist.https://www.youtellmetexas.com/2019/08/15/responsible-policy-isnt-racist/
https://www.youtellmetexas.com/2019/08/15/responsible-policy-isnt-racist/#commentsThu, 15 Aug 2019 21:35:21 +0000https://www.youtellmetexas.com/?p=7949This photo shows Ellis Island Detention Station in New York Harbour as news photographers return to Manhattan after a visit to the island on June 13, 1947. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service permitted photographs to be taken on the Island, but no close-ups of individuals and detainees. (AP Photo)

The Trump administration is proposing to tighten rules under which immigrants aspiring to permanent residency in the United States might obtain that privilege. The key provision is that any aspiring immigrant who has accessed public benefits such as welfare or food stamps in 12 of the past 36 months would be ineligible for permanent residency (a green card).

Oh, how the Left is howling.

Of course, it is neither racist nor anti-immigrant to insist that people from other countries who want to become permanent U.S. residents be capable of supporting themselves. Such has been the law of the land since the Immigration Act of 1882, which states in part,

…any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge…shall not be permitted to land.”

It is perfectly reasonable that immigration policy would protect U.S. taxpayers from the burden of supporting indigent immigrants. It’s in fact more than merely reasonable. It is incumbent. No nation, no matter how wealthy, can afford to import poverty. Certainly, no nation that is $22 trillion in debt and facing an entitlement funding crisis of enormous proportions can afford such folly.

Liberals are fond of saying that the United States is a nation of immigrants. That is true. But they leave out the fact that the immigrants about whom they selectively wax rhapsodic came to the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries via Galveston and Ellis Island legally.

Lefties who go on about our immigrant heritage would do well to actually visit Ellis Island. Such a visit would be instructive. One would learn that not every would-be immigrant was admitted. There are images and stories of the heartbreak of aspiring immigrants who pulled together their very last resources to afford a steamship ticket in steerage only to be turned away for one reason or another. One would learn that there were programs in place intended to assimilate new immigrant arrivals into American culture. And one would learn that immigrants were required, as a condition of their admission, to demonstrate self-sufficiency.

Of course, the reporting on this story has been positively godawful. The network newscasts have been filled with predictable stories of families living on the edge of starvation for fear of losing their chances of getting green cards. Nearly every story has cast the Trump administration as heartless, unfeeling, uncaring and, (drumroll please), racist.

Not reported, however, is that though not enforced, it is in fact still U.S. law that legal immigrants cannot access public benefits for five years after being granted permanent resident status.

In short, none of this is new. What’s new is an administration with the resolve to enforce policy that has long been in place. And it is a fact that almost every country requires those wishing to immigrate to show the means for maintaining self-sufficiency once admitted. U.S. taxpayers (indeed taxpayers everywhere) do not have a presumptive obligation to support the world’s poor. Immigration policy that recognizes this fact isn’t racist. It’s responsible.

A war of words broke out this week between President Trump and Elijah Cummings, the Democrat who represents Maryland’s 7thCongressional District, which encompasses Baltimore.

The skirmish started when Cummings berated Department of Homeland Security acting secretary Kevin McAleenan over conditions at Customs & Border Patrol detention facilities at the southern border. The president, never one to take without giving back, said to Cummings via Twitter that Cummings would do well to take a look at the horrible conditions in his own district – most particularly Baltimore – before leveling criticism at the administration.

Predictably, Trump was branded – again – as a racist.

Where the racism is in the president’s observation is objectively hard to find. He never mentioned Elijah Cummings’ skin color. He never mentioned the ethnic makeup of the City of Baltimore.

What he did was state an observable fact. Baltimore is an urban catastrophe.

As recently as 1980, Baltimore was a top 10 American city with close to a million residents. Today, with a population of just over 600,000 and dropping, it ranks number 30 – eight places behind El Paso. Baltimore has lost population in every census since 1980. It has the highest murder rate in the United States, suffering 300-plus homicides per year — more than New York, a city 14 times its size.

There are 17,000 abandoned buildings in Baltimore. Those vacant buildings are home to rats, cockroaches and drug dealers. A recent TV news report from Baltimore featured an African-American mother who makes her children sleep on the floor in order to avoid the possibility of being hit by stray gunfire.

Baltimore’s decline mirrors that of other once great American cities, examples of which include St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee.

So question: What do these cities have in common? Answer: All have been dominated by one-party Democrat rule for decades. The last Republican mayor of St. Louis left office in 1949. The last Republican mayor in Baltimore departed in 1967. Cleveland has had Democrat mayors in 63 of the last 77 years and 29 of the last 29. Detroit’s last Republican left in 1962. And Milwaukee, for practical purposes, has never had a Republican mayor.

President Trump, unlike any of the Republican presidents who held office while these cities were deteriorating, dared call out the sad state of Baltimore to its elected congressional representative, Elijah Cummings.

In doing so, he by extension calls attention to the other troubled American cities that suffer under single-party Democratic political domination.

No Republican president prior to Trump has had the gumption to tell the truth about anything if there existed even a microscopic chance that it might evoke a charge of racism. This despite the fact that pointing out failure makes one a realist, not a racist. Fear of a racism charge means that nothing gets fixed.

Of course, Democrats don’t really want to fix cities like Baltimore. They’d rather just keep taking the votes of beleaguered citizens for granted. Weaponization of the “R” word has allowed them to do that.

When Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate alleged Trump campaign collusion with the Russians to steal the 2016 presidential election – a questionable premise from the start – we heard endlessly in the media that Mueller is a man of unimpeachable credentials – a pillar of a man, a war hero, a man of uncommon wisdom.

According to the media narrative, Robert Mueller is the very embodiment of sober, non-partisan moral, ethical and legal rectitude. His very presence lent heft to the serious business of ferreting out the obvious wrongdoing that resulted in an unimaginable election outcome. Robert Mueller is just the man we need to assure the American people that our electoral system will not be hijacked with impunity.

But Wednesday, in two much-anticipated House committee hearings, that media-promoted cloak of respectability slipped from Mueller’s shoulders and fell to the floor. Mueller’s painful, cringe-inducing testimony revealed a befuddled, doddering old man with little command of the contents of a 450-page report that consumed $40 million in taxpayer money and that now bears his signature.

Any objective observer watching Mueller’s testimony can see that he lacks the wits to head up a large-scale investigation. That a large-scale investigation happened anyway leads one to conclude that Mueller was merely a front man. His nominal respectability was used as the name on the brass doorplate behind which a group of rabidly partisan government lawyers tried their best to overturn the 2016 election. It was an effort driven by the simple fact that official Washington – a.k.a. the “Swamp” and consisting mostly of Democrats but also more than a few Republicans – simply could not accept the plain truth that Donald Trump fairly and legitimately defeated Hillary Clinton.

It now appears beyond much doubt that Andrew Weissmann, the career DOJ lawyer who donated money to Hillary Clinton and attended her election night soiree in New York, was actually running the investigation. Weissman assembled a group of out-in-the-open Hillary Clinton supporters to be on his investigative team. To hear Robert Mueller tell it Wednesday, he was unaware of this.

Thus comes to an end any semblance of respectability surrounding the Mueller investigation – not that it had much to begin with – together with any remaining hope by Democrats that Donald Trump will be forcibly removed from office.

So, what now?

In a functioning free republic governed by the rule of law, sober men and women would get to the bottom of how such a specious attempt to take down a duly elected president ever got off the ground in the first place.

If the Swamp is allowed to criminalize every presidential election that a Democrat doesn’t win – and mobilize the federal law enforcement apparatus in that pursuit – there is little hope for the long-term survival of the republic. Swamp dwellers cannot overrule We the People. The abuses of power that culminated in the Mueller investigation must be accounted for and severely punished.

With the Mueller investigation now well and truly over, the real investigation needs to begin.

In addition to reinvigorating an economy that had been moribund for most of a decade; and in addition to finally standing up to the likes of China, North Korea and Iran, President Trump has rendered still another valuable service to the American people.

By campaigning on the issue of illegal immigration and by then seeking to actually deliver on the promises made in connection to that subject, President Trump has forced Democrats into the open. Unlike under any past or prospective president named Bush or Romney, Donald Trump has forced the Democrats to plainly and unmistakably reveal themselves. All prior statements, show votes and policy planks to the contrary notwithstanding, we now know that most of the Democratic Party favors open borders. They may pay lip service to “secure borders” or “comprehensive immigration reform.” But by their actions, their inactions and their reactions to Donald Trump, it is clear that most Democrats consider sovereign borders and the enforcement of long-standing U.S. immigration law to be immoral.

So now that we know that Democrats are OK with the thousands of illegal border crossings that take place each day, we must ask them a question.

Is there a plan?

Beyond looking for the most expeditious way to get them registered to vote, has any thought been given as to how to accommodate a hundred thousand-plus new U.S. residents every month? Can anyone explain the wisdom of every year allowing a million or so poor, low-skilled, social services-consuming strangers into a country that is $22 trillion in debt and whose cities are already coping with a burgeoning homeless problem?

The majority of illegal immigrants arrive penniless. Most are low-skilled and poorly educated. Many have health problems needing urgent attention. More than half bring children with them.

What is the plan for dealing with this influx? Where do we intend for them to live? Who is going to pay for that housing?

Who is going to pay to feed them?

How and where will they be employed? To what extent will lawful American citizens already on a low rung of the employment ladder be displaced from their jobs?

When will construction begin on the new classrooms that we’ll need to educate a massive wave of children who don’t currently speak English? Who is going to pay the teachers?

Who is going to build the additional capacity into already over-burdened local hospitals, ERs and clinics? From where will the additional physicians and nurses come?

Let’s not forget police departments. Some percentage of every human cohort is criminal. You’re naïve if you don’t believe that with respect to law enforcement, we’re going to need to staff up.

And finally, is there a plan to cap this off? Has anyone run the numbers and said, “This is the point at which we’ll be full.”? Is that number five million people? Ten million? A hundred million?

Is there a plan?

I can tell you it’s nowhere in the fine print of the Green New Deal. I just checked.

It’s a good idea nowadays to take most public opinion polls with a healthy pinch of salt. Originally intended to serve as a reflection of public opinion, polls have come to be used more and more by a corrupt media as a tool to shape public opinion. But one polling organization – Rasmussen Reports – stands as an exception. Rasumussen was an outlier in predicting Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Given that record, a June 28 poll by Rasmussen should have Democrats worried about 2020.

In summary, the report said, “Voters see most Democrat presidential hopefuls as more liberal, extreme,” than they, the respondents are. There was a lot of data in the report but here’s the money section for 2020. Among independents, who tend to decide elections, “Fifty eight percent of these so-called swing voters view most of the announced Democratic White House hopefuls as more liberal than they are, and by a 49 percent to 29 percent margin, they say the agenda of most of these candidates is extreme.”

For this, the Dems have a 29-year old former barmaid to thank. The upset victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the New York Democratic congressional primary in 2018 – and the fawning media coverage that followed – has had a profound effect on the party.

Primary elections play to the base and AOC has managed to push the base far to the left. Her Green New Deal – discussed in this space previously – is by far the most far-left set of proposals ever to make it into mainstream political discussion.

And thus the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls find themselves pulled inexorably to positions that were unthinkable even to the Obama campaign. And thus they stand recently on debate stages on two successive nights seemingly oblivious to the kind of sentiment reflected in this current Rasmussen poll.

Ensconced as they are in their coastal liberal enclaves and protected by a supine media, the entire Democratic presidential field seems blissfully unaware of how they are viewed by the deplorables and the bitter clingers who constitute a sizable majority in the heartland.

They have managed to convince themselves that their far-left views represent the views of a majority of Americans.

They appear to believe that open borders, free healthcare for illegal aliens, free college, forgiveness of student debt, abortion right up until the moment of birth and beyond, the abolition of private health insurance, 70 percent taxation on current income and even taxation of previously taxed wealth are all mainstream ideas. Any number of polls – including this Rasmussen poll – say that they are wrong.

Playing to the base during the primary and then moving to the center during the general election is par for the course. But it’s hard to imagine this time how the Dems will be able to move back to the center from having been so far to the left. In an era of full employment and strong wage growth, the Trump campaign commercials are practically writing themselves.

My grandfather, Lewis N. Carrell, was a working-class man who raised a family during the Great Depression. He died in 1969 having voted a straight Democrat ticket his entire adult life.

Watching the Democratic presidential debate Wednesday night, I was struck by the idea that if Lewis Carrell had somehow been raised from the dead in time to watch with me, he would not recognize the Democratic Party as represented by that gaggle of leftist radicals on the stage. The Democratic Party of 2019 bears little resemblance to the Democrats of Lewis Carrell’s day.

OK, fine. So, then, what about comparison even to the much more recent Democratic Party that elected Bill Clinton? This gang of Democrats is radical even by those standards.

Two examples: abortion and immigration.

When my grandfather was alive, abortion was a topic not suitable for polite company. By 1996, when Clinton was running for re-election, abortion was a nearly unavoidable topic. But even so, Clinton still said that abortion should be, “…safe, legal and rare.”

Fast forward to Wednesday night. The Democrats were elbowing each other out of the way to stake out the farthest left position on the subject. Democrat views on abortion go to places that were unimaginable even as recently as Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign.

Today, if you’re a Democrat and want to have any hope of being the nominee, it’s not enough to simply support unrestricted abortion on demand. You have to zealously promote it. Safe, legal and rare be damned. To this group of Dems, abortion is the inalienable right – if not the duty – of any pregnant woman right up until the very moment of natural birth – and beyond. It gets even more crazy. Texas’s own Julian Castro reminded us that we must provide state funds for the abortions of “female trans people.” (You can’t make this stuff up.)

Moving to immigration; whatever opinions Lewis Carrell had on the subject, it is absolutely certain that none of them included completely open borders. He had enough common sense to understand that you can’t let hundreds of thousands of poor, unvetted migrants just stream into the country every month. No such common sense among the Dems on the debate stage Wednesday, however. To Dems seeking the presidency, lawlessness is apparently preferable to even a semblance of order.

There’s so much more if only we had time.

Suffice that the Democratic Party of my grandfather was led by the likes of Harry Truman, Sam Rayburn, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson – all men of the left but substantial men, nonetheless.

The leader of today’s Democratic Party isn’t running for president and isn’t House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The de facto leader of today’s Democrats is a 29-year old barmaid turned Congresswoman named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is the Grand Marshal of the Radical Left Crazy Parade – and all those Dems on stage Wednesday night are proudly marching in it.